Re: 2.99.48.2 piping, Qs (New to Zmail..), Debian Package

[Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>]

> I have started using Zmailer to run an exploder for the Linux Mailing
> lists with a daily throughput of 30.000 - 100.000 messages (.com domain
> only right now) on a Cyrix 686 166, 16M Ram, Debian 1.3, Linux 2.0.30.
> 
> Used to run exim but exim got flaky on days with more than 50.000
> messages and got fits managing huge message queues.

	A task that may become laborous for ZMailers too, but not THAT
	difficult as to most other MTAs...  :-)

> -- Pipes --
> 
> The following entries in /etc/aliases does not work (this is BeroList a
> simple List Server used for some local Linux unrelated Lists).
> 
> #-- berolist begin
> news:"|/usr/sbin/list news"
> talk:"|/usr/sbin/list talk"
> admin:"|/usr/sbin/list admin"
> #-- berolist end
> 
> I have gotten Signal 11 and returncode 139 in the Queue Logs.
> I can run the list program manually just fine and feed the message that
> would be piped to it into stdin.
> 
> One issue might be that berolist does produce output to show the progress
> of message delivery on stdout. Is that a problem for Zmailer? Why does
> Zmailer not log the output or sent it back to the sender?

	ZMailer reads ONE line of that output, and does something
	with it, but it does not handle multiple lines of the
	piped process output..

	Picking more lines of the output, and sending it to the
	error address (which is what ?) is thinkable.

> -- Queue Display --
> 
> Where can I find documentation what thes HQ QA etc abbreviations in the
> Queue display mean? I really like the output of "mailq -Q" but it would be
> better if I knew the details.

	smtp/aol.com/0  R=1  A=147 P=19598 HA=571s FA=571s OF=1 QA=1d18h
	smtp/some.com/0	R=1  A=58 W=1860s QA=11h11m28s

	"From the Source" is not acceptable answer ?
	Ok, 'man mailq' should have it, but I haven't gotten around, so
	here is the short version:

	R  = Recipients for this  channel/host  thread
	A  = Attempts on delivering this
	P  = TransportAgent PID
	HA = '#hungry age' -- how long since saw '#hungry' state from TA
	FA = Feed-Age -- how long since last time did feed the TA
	OF = OverFeed count -- how many jobs were fed, and are unprocessed
	W  = Wait time until next attempt
	QA = QueueAge -- age of the oldest message in the thread

> -- Forcing message delivery ---
> 
> How can I force the delivery of a message immediately and see whats going
> on?

	With SMTP by issueing command:

		ETRN some.com

	(for above examples..)

> -- Load limitation ? ---
> 
> Is there some way to tell Zmailer to stop beginning new deliveries at a
> certain load average? I notice that the load is usually around 0.5 but
> sometimes there are spikes up to load of 8 or more when vger.rutgers.edu
> starts transmitting after being down for awhile.
> Would be nice if the load on the system is stable so that the
> responsetimes are reasonable and consistent even when overflooded.

	The scheduler does not have load-average testing function,
	but the  'mytime()' daemon could do the load-average extraction
	from the system too..  (That is, it should not be done 10 000
	times because each new recipient assimilation is potential place
	to start a transporter, when there are that many recipients
	(or more!) in the queue...)

	I don't like it, as there are very few things that are more
	non-standard than load-average extraction in various systems..

> -- Daily Reports ? ---
> 
> Exim had a nice daily status report. Does something similar exist for
> Zmailer?

	I know several scripts in existence, and now ZMailer produces pretty
	much similar syslogs to that of the sendmail.  Thus  sendmail's scripts
	are fairly easily modifiable..

	Could you send example of EXIMs report ?  Maybe something similar
	can be created.

> -- Binary Package for Linux --
> 
> I packaged Zmailer as a debian package. Its available from
>   ftp://lalug.org/debian_local
> (Hope that is ok?)

	Yes.

> --- +++ --- +++ --- +++ --- +++ --- +++ --- +++ --- +++ ---

	/Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>